- Talk 1: Traffic Congestion, TransDec, ClearPath, and Time-Dependent A*: A BigData Problem, A System Solution, A Product, and an Algorithm (Prof. Cyrus Shahabi, Director)
The vast amounts of transportation datasets (traffic flow, incidents, etc.) collected by various federal and state agencies are extremely valuable in real-time decision-making, planning, and management of the transportation systems. In this talk, I will argue that considering the large volume of the transportation data, variety of the data (different modalities and resolutions), and the velocity of the data arrival, developing a scalable system that allows for effective querying and analysis of both archived and real-time data is an intrinsically challenging BigData problem. Subsequently, I will present our end-to-end prototype system, dubbed TransDec (short for Transportation Decision-Making), which enables real-time integration, visualization, querying, and analysis of these dynamic and archived transportation datasets. I will then discuss a GPS navigation application enabled by such a system and demonstrate its commercialization as a product called ClearPath (see http://myfastestpath.com). Motivated by ClearPath, we will look under the hood and focus on a route-planning problem where the weights on the road-network edges vary as a function of time due to the variability of traffic congestion. I will show that naive approaches to address this problem are either inaccurate or slow, leading to our new approach to this problem: A time-dependent A* algorithm.

- Talk 2: MediaQ: Mobile Media Management System (Dr. Seon Ho Kim, Assoc. Director)
User generated video content is experiencing significant growth which is expected to continue and further accelerate forming Big Data in social media. MediaQ is a novel online media management system to collect, organize, share, and search mobile multimedia contents using automatically tagged geospatial metadata. User generated-videos can be uploaded to the MediaQ from users’ smartphones, iPhone and Android, and displayed accurately on a map interface according to their automatically sensed geospatial and other metadata. This talk is to present the design of a comprehensive mobile multimedia management system, MediaQ, and to share our experience in its implementation. Our extensive real world experimental case studies demonstrate that MediaQ can be an effective and comprehensive solution for various mobile multimedia applications.

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also the Director of the NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He was also the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. He received his B.S. in M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively.

Seon Ho Kim is currently working as an Associate Director in the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. Before joining IMSC, he worked at the University of Denver and the University of the District of Columbia as faculty for eleven years. He received his BS degree in Electronic Engineering from the Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea in 1986. He also received his MS in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, in 1994 and 1999, respectively.